Letter: Shot in the arm for immunotherapy

SHARON KINGMAN's article 'Back to a plague-ridden future' (Review, 28 February) outlines the threat of disease-causing microbes resistant to all known drugs and ends with Professor Barry Bloom's warning that 'we may be working our way back to a frightening future'. This would indeed be the case if antimicrobial drugs provided our only defence against such microbes.

Antimicrobial drugs have only been in widespread use since the end of the Second World War. Before then, infectious diseases were a serious menace yet the human race survived because our immune defence mechanisms ensured no microbe could attain total dominance over our species.

The discovery of penicillin drove immunotherapy - fighting infection by stimulating the host's immune defence system - into near-oblivion.

In a recent letter in the Lancet, Dr John Stanford of the Middlesex Hospital and his collaborators in Iran reported encouraging results with a new form of immunotherapy in patients with tuberculosis resistant to almost all known drugs. In the same vein, two American scientists, Shearer and Clerici, have suggested that some form of vaccine able to readjust immune reactivity might provide the means of controlling Aids.

Thus, there are alternative approaches to the conquest of infectious disease and the future may not be so frightening after all.

Dr John M Grange

Royal Brompton Hospital

London SW3